Employment Hero launches Swag: The AI Solution to Help SMEs Win the Talent War Against Big Corporates

Posted on 6th June 2023

Employment Hero launches Swag to make it easier for employers to find and secure talent, significantly cutting down time to hire and saving SMEs thousands per year.

HR, payroll, and employee engagement platform Employment Hero is on a mission to reinvent the entire employment relationship with its new, world-first employment superapp, Swag.

With AI-powered recruitment functionality designed to streamline the job search for small-and-medium-sized businesses (SMEs) and jobseekers – and buoyed by a network of 200,000+ employers and 1M+ employees – Swag makes finding, onboarding, and rewarding talent easier.

Employment Hero’s core mission is to make employment more streamlined and valuable for UK SMEs. To date, the company has done this by digitising employment for SMEs by creating a platform that gives employers confidence in the accuracy, compliance, and transparency of their HR and payroll processes.

The next stage in the company’s development is tackling the employee side of the equation: making the traditionally tedious task of job hunting better. Swag introduces two core features: Work and Career to seamlessly integrate the recruitment journey into a comprehensive employee experience.

This evolution is spurred by the need to solve two big issues in today’s employment landscape:

The struggle for SMEs to find and retain employees

With 13.3 per cent of businesses experiencing a shortage of workers, UK unemployment low at 3.9 per cent, and economic growth remaining stagnant, small businesses need help more than ever to stand out against large companies with bigger budgets and more perks.

The consumer cost of living crisis

Interest rates at the highest level since 2008, inflation at 8.7 per cent, and growth in employees average total pay at just 5.9 per cent are all having an impact on employee mental health and productivity, as more employees are concerned about their financial outlook. Swag evens the playing field by giving SMEs the most advanced tools to attract and retain great talent and give jobseekers and employees a way to match with great roles.

Swag by Employment Hero cuts the cost and time to hire for SMEs

With the help of AI, Swag proactively addresses these pain points by empowering employers to streamline key parts of the recruiting process, including:

● Using the power of AI to produce first-draft job descriptions and to predict a business’ future hiring needs

● Matching eligible candidates with suitable roles

● Posting jobs to hundreds of popular job boards in a few clicks

Swag also features a job board called Swag Jobs which gives SMEs free access to a pool of hundreds of thousands of work-ready applicants – with no job posting or advertising costs. In a time where job board advertising fees have increased, Swag gives SMEs the tools to get their jobs in front of the best candidates whatever their budget.

It matches job seekers with great roles, taking the heavy lifting out of the job seeking process, including:

● Using the power of AI to produce first-draft cover letters

● AI-powered job suggestions based on a candidate’s profile and skills

● One-click ‘apply’ functionality to apply for a job in seconds

● Automatic CV and resume parsing to avoid manual data entry

Streamlining every stage of the employment experience

Once employed, Swag becomes the primary interface for all work-related tasks, including time and attendance management, leave tracking, and rostering. Swag’s Work features allow employees to reduce onboarding administration and common HR inefficiencies by keeping timesheets, payslips, leave requests, induction policies, and certifications within one central location. Swag also promotes reward and recognition initiatives such as peer shoutouts and accredited personal achievements within the business.

Ben Thompson, Co-founder and CEO of Employment Hero, said: “We are rapidly adding new features that will match candidates with a job before it’s even posted – and faster than the job boards can. In the next 12 months, we plan to replace even more manual tasks with AI, further streamlining the process and freeing up people’s time to focus on what they do best.

“Through AI and applications like Swag, the entire recruitment process can be streamlined and personalised. We developed Swag to help employers stand out in a competitive hiring market and to help jobseekers cut down on manual tasks such as sifting through open roles and writing up time-consuming cover letters.

“While AI serves as an assistant in the hiring process for both employers and employees, it by no means replaces the human elements of recruiting. Rather than automating every interaction, Swag streamlines the manual, tedious aspects of the hiring process, such as writing job descriptions, finding promising candidates, sorting through swathes of unsuitable applicants while enhancing the personal parts, from discovering your next great hire and speaking 1:1 with interested applicants, to forming meaningful relationships with talent for future recruitment. With more time back in the day, SMEs can focus on growing their business and finding the best people in the market to do so.”

A first-of-its-kind Digital Employment Passport

Through Swag Career job seekers can create a digital employment passport and view thousands of job adverts across multiple industries. Once a candidate has applied for a role, they can access an interactive, real-time messaging function between themselves and hiring managers, keeping jobseekers in the loop at every stage of the hiring journey – whether they’re successful or not.

“The Swag superapp can engage the candidate with the employer in a much more interactive, authentic way. You get direct messaging between the hiring manager and the candidate through the interview and recruitment phase, then Swag becomes the onboarding tool to bring that employee into the business, it becomes the tool to manage work, and then it’s how you get paid and how you save and spend,” said Thompson.

“Put all that together and you’ve got a unique value proposition for candidates to find and apply for jobs, to be recruited, onboarded, manage their work, and then access benefits and perks that make the most of their pay.”

Employment Hero is also working on the launch of earned-wage access and a credit-free pay option for employees, as well as a range of employee discounts and rewards with high street and online brands, as part of the next phase of rollout of the superapp in the UK, delivering further benefits to employers and employees.